AT PALESTINIAN UNIVERSITY, CHARCOAL BURNED INTO STUDENT’S FACE, AND NAILS HAMMERED INTO HIS FEET

It is interesting that among the mass of coverage in the media today to coincide with the Annapolis Conference, there is next to no mention of the continuing human rights abuses occurring in Palestinian-run areas including those involving “moderate” Fatah.

For example, while a determined and many would say bigoted group of British academics is still trying to organize a boycott of Israeli (and only Israeli) universities, this is what is happening at a Palestinian one.

West Bank campus closes after alleged torture of student

By Matthew Kalman

The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 21, 2007

Classes at Birzeit University, in the West Bank, were suspended on Tuesday after escalating violence between Palestinian political groups on the campus.

Tension has been rising between supporters of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and the radical Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine over a West Bank security crackdown in which militants in the Popular Front, known as the PFLP, have been arrested by Fatah-dominated security forces.

The university’s administration decided to suspend classes and evacuate students from the campus after a Fatah-affiliated student was assaulted in his dormitory room, apparently by four men from the PFLP. The student, Ahmad Jarrar, was treated at a hospital for severe injuries suffered as he was apparently being tortured.

The assailants used charcoal to burn Mr. Jarrar’s face. They also hammered nails into his feet, according to eyewitnesses. Fatah gunmen then arrived at the campus and threatened to kill PFLP supporters.

Imagine the moral hysteria if an Israeli had nailed someone’s feet! I guess, even if you wanted to call this a crucifixion, it doesn’t have the same savor if you can’t accuse a Jew of doing it.

4 Responses to Torture at Main Palestinian University

This is an extraordinary story — not the least because it appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education, liberal academia’s very own industry rag (e.g. see last week’s morally-indignant front-page feature on the monthlong IDF detention/interrogation of an Israeli-Arab/American geographer arrested near the Lebanese border days before last year’s war.) How journalist Matthew Kalman dared to file this heretical account of true torture – nay, a crucifixion!) in the very halls of academy is a mystery. (I hope, for his safety, that Kalman doesn’t plan to cover the West Bank much longer.)

I don’t think you can blame the university for this. The attack was by thugs from off-campus. Anti-Fatah thugs, too. So it would be like blaming the U.S. after some hoodlums broke into a dorm. Of course Fatah has done things which provoke such retaliation…